At the beginning of the year in our yearly mobile predictions report, my colleague Julie Ask and I made the following call: "mobile will affect more than just your digital operations — it will transform your entire business. 2014 will be the year that companies increase investments to transform their businesses with mobile as a focal point." McDonald’s France is a great example of such a trend.

In France, you can now order a Big Mac anytime, anywhere on your smartphone, tablet, or desktop and pick it up later at any of 1,200 McDonald’s restaurants. But mobile ordering and in-store pick up are just the first steps of a broader and more ambitious strategy: differentiating McDonald’s brand experience and powering a future relationship marketing platform by enabling direct behavioral customer insights. Although it started with a mobile ordering and payment app nationwide, McDonald’s France aims to transform all points of customer engagement by building a platform to extend new services to loyal customers and evolving the entire organization.

Despite a less mature mobile ecosystem and lower mobile usage than in the US, McDonald’s France was the first subsidiary of McDonald’s to launch a mobile ordering offering at scale. Such an ordering service is only at pilot stage in the US. France is McDonald’s second-biggest market after the United States, with €4.35 billion in turnover in 2012. Most other countries had piloted mobile payments so far. With more than 16 million members, McDonald’s Japan mobile couponing and in-store contactless payment services is the only other mobile service for McDonald’s (and the vast majority of brands) that has scaled massively, but it does not yet offer the same value.

At the end of last year, I was intrigued by McDonald’s France's ability to move quickly from a commercial pilot to a nationwide rollout in just three months. To better understand how McDonald’s France managed to deliver a differentiated experience at scale and to start transforming its business via mobile, I interviewed Jean-Noël Pénichon, head of digital strategy and transformation at McDonald’s France.

Key success factors included McDonald’s ability to:

·         Make decisions via new forms of governance.

·         Evangelize internally and externally.

·         Orchestrate an ecosystem of strategic partners like DDB, Worldline and PayPal.

Clients can read the full case study here.

If you’re not as mature and advanced as McDonald’s France, follow a disciplined framework. Use these four steps to embrace mobile moments:

1.       Identify the mobile moments that matter.

2.       Design the mobile engagement.

3.       Engineer your platforms and operations.

4.       Analyze the results to adapt and expand the service.

These four steps are the IDEA cycle. Repeat it continuously to succeed.

This report is the first in a series of case studies around the Mobile Mind Shift and the ability to master the IDEA cycle.